big nut. New cashew variety ‘Nethra Jumbo-1’ aims at increasing farmers’ revenue

The Directorate of Cashew Research (DCR) at Puttur in Dakshina Kannada district has released a new jumbo nut hybrid cashew – ‘Nethra Jumbo-1’.

J Dinakara Adiga, Principal Scientist at DCR, said that ‘Nethra Jumbo-1’ can save about ₹16,000 a tonne on labour cost and fetch a premium of ₹10,000 for bigger size per tonne of nut yield. This gives an additional revenue of ₹26,000 for farmers on every tonne of nut yield making cashew cultivation a profitable venture under rain-fed horticulture.

Explaining this to BusinessLine , he said the advantage here is that around 90 cashew nuts make a kg in this variety. In other varieties, around 160 nuts are needed to make a kg. This brings down the amount of labour required for picking by almost a half.

While other varieties need around 60 labours, it requires around 30-35 labours bringing down the man days required for its harvesting by almost 50 per cent.

“The process of harvesting through picking of fallen nuts accounts to major share of expenditure to the tune of nearly 40 per cent in cashew cultivation,” he said.

Nut size

Nut size is another advantage of this variety. Nethra Jumbo-1 produces 12 gm nut with a high kernel recovery and the larger kernels (W130). Most of the other released cashew varieties are of medium (7 gm) to small nut (around 5-6 gm) type with a few exception of bold nut types weighing around 8-9 gm.

He said the development of jumbo nut varieties would significantly reduce the manpower requirement for harvesting of nuts apart from fetching premium price from processors as it would lead to production of premium sized kernels with higher market price.

Quoting his interactions with stakeholders in cashew sector, he said the bigger sized cashew nuts get a premium price from the cashew processors. Since the ‘Nethra Jumbo-1’ has bigger nut size, processors can pay around ₹10 more per kg. With this, one tonne helps a farmer get nearly ₹10,000.

The bigger nuts also improve processing efficiency in the cashew factory as it would also save labour in processing apart from getting higher out-turn.

Apart from this, ‘Nethra Jumbo-1’ bears early in the season. He said farmers would get good rate for the varieties that come early in the season. Farmers can bring this variety to market by January. Other varieties come to the market by March-May.

The work on the development of this variety started during 1999-2000. “We released it in 2021 after continuous evaluation for so many years,” he said.

To a query on the commercial launch of this variety, he said the DCR is in the process of getting protection for this variety under PPV&FRA (Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act). “Farmers can expect the planting material by next monsoon,” Adiga said.

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